Should we hold those who perpetrated the Holocaust accountable for their actions if they were following orders from an authority figure? Explain your thoughts.
Hitler rised to power by using violence and fear. I believe that he used his power to change how Germany saw Jewish people. Hitler made Many Germans believe that Jewish people were inferior to them, and torturing them was alright. However this might not always be the case. There must have been Germans that were forced and ordered to do these actions towards Jewish people. But we can’t tell which person was innocent and which were guilty. Many of the defendants argued that they were just “following orders”. Judges believed that “following orders” was not a legitimate defense for criminal acts. I believe that the way we punished the people after the war was a good way to to serve punishments to people who committed horrible crimes. People who were associated with, and committed the crimes should be punished even though they “were forced”. Many could lie and others need a better reason why they weren’t at fault because in the end, They did something terrible.
Just to clarify, Hitler didn’t really need to convince people to hate Jews, Anti-Semitism had a long history in most of the Western world, even here in North America. So you might say he capitalized on that and used it to gain support. The hatred of Jews was one way to bring people together to support the Nazi party.
Yes, people who participated in the killings in the Holocaust could not use the defense that their superiors made them do it so they were innocent. But the Milgrim Experiment complicates that as it shows us that most of us will follow the orders of an authority figure even if there is no threat to us.